john willshire

John V Willshire is founder of Smithery, an independent Strategic Design Practice that helps organisations Make Things People Want rather than Make People Want Things. Over the years, he’s worked with people like the BBC, LEGO, The Co-operative, Richmond Housing Partnership, UNDP, Wellcome Trust and others, helping them see their worlds in new ways to make future-facing strategic decisions in practical and tangible ways. John teaches on the RCA’s new Design Futures programme, and leads IED Barcelona’s Innovation and Future Thinking course, and is a founding member of The STEPS Collective, a community exploring regenerative practices. 

But he is also a father, husband, neighbour and volunteer in and around Lindfield in Mid Sussex. Having moved into a new-build estate in 2016, and realising the lack of birds on a feeder was indicative of something much more broken in how these communities were constructed, John started rewilding his own family garden before finding that across the community, creating spaces for nature to thrive was a much more powerful social force than he could have imagined.